The Aero Bike That Conquered Paris-Roubaix

The Queen of the Classics.

The Hell of the North.

One of the Monuments of Cycling.

Paris-Roubaix is a race with many names. And if you’ve never watched the event, you’ll find it hard to grasp just how truly brutal it is. It sounds contrived to say, but this truly is a race for the hard men of the sport.

Last week's Paris-Roubaix was a 253 kilometer jaunt (that’s 157 miles), through exposed farm land and old World War 1 battlefields. Cyclists worked their way through abandoned farm roads and horrific cobblestone sectors that have bested bike engineers for years. If you’re a fan of the race, you’ll remember Greg Lemond and all of Team Z riding RockShox suspension forks with 30mm of travel in 1991. The great Johan Museeuw even rode a prototype dual suspension Bianchi back in 1994. Heck, just last year Team Sky brought a Pinarello with 10mm of rear suspension called the Dogma K8-S to Roubaix. That’s how rough these roads are.

Competitors have been known to double wrap their bar tape. They’ve used bigger tires at lower pressures. They’ve ridden endurance geometry bikes with slack angles and long chain stays. In short, they’ve tried everything they could think of to lessen the pain inflicted by the cobbles.

That’s what makes Mathew Hayman's victory on the Scott Foil so incredible. Not only is it a purebred race bike, the Foil has also been designed and marketed as an aero road bike. Now, conventional wisdom tells us that the tube shaping necessary to make a bike aerodynamic effectively ruins it’s ride quality. In fact, since the invention of the aero road category, bike manufacturers, all of them, have tried to ensure that consumers knew the following.

“Our aero road bikes are for pure speed. They’re for criteriums and breakaways. If the roads get rough, you’ll want to look at our endurance line.”

The same could be said of the Scott Foil of years past. But recently, the bike's been redesigned. Engineers have done clever things by beefing up the chain stays and downtube of the Foil, while integrating a bit of compliance into the seat stays and top tube.

It’s been tinkered with.

It's been improved.

It’s still fast. My God, it’s fast. Check out the last 3km of Paris-Roubaix to witness the greats of our sport slugging it out. But almost out of nowhere, Scott has created an aero road bike that’s also comfortable. We love this bike, and we're so proud to be able to offer exceptional Scott products to our customers. Enjoy a small gallery of the gorgeous Foil 10 below, or come by any of our seven Texas locations to try one of these for yourself.